I am interested in, from a comparative perspective, understanding how social and family context shapes individual demographic differentials and socioeconomic inequality, throughout the individual life course and across multiple generations.

To achieve such an academic goal, and more importantly, to fulfill my own curiosity, I have been working hard to

compare withinEast Asia in the past

by harmonizing and analyzing five large-scale individual-level panel datasets - a total of 4 million panel observations of more than 650,000 individuals, transcribed from population administrative records in northeast China, northeast Japan, southeast Korea, and colonial Taiwan between 1700 and 1950 (e.g. PhD Dissertation 2016)

by collaborating with East Asian scholars to construct and analyze microdata for East Asian historical populations (e.g. articles in Social Science & Medicine 2014, Demography 2015, Demographic Research forthcoming)

compare between East and West in the past

by collaborating with European and American scholars to compare East Asian and Western historical populations on topics related to social mobility, family demography and public health.

​​embrace interdisciplinaryapproaches beyond social sciences

​by collaborating with behavioral scientists to study the evolutionary implications of human family behavior (e.g. article in Evolution and Human Behavior 2017)

by collaborating with computer scientists to develop tools for visual analytics on the heterogeneous shaping of family trees over generations - the yet-to-be-known structural fundamental to all multi-generational transmission processes. (e.g. article in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2018)

link the pastto present - primary for my postdoc research at Princeton

by collaborating with Yu Xie to study long-term trends of assortative marriage and intergenerational mobility in the East and West​

*Below presents some selected research. Please see my CV for a complete list of publications and working projects.

Abstract: Whether and how does the structure of family trees differ by ancestral traits over generations? This is a fundamental question regarding the structural heterogeneity of family trees for the multi-generational transmission research. However, previous work mostly focuses on parent-child scenarios due to the lack of proper tools to handle the complexity of extending the research to multi-generational processes. Through an iterative design study with social scientists and historians, we develop TreeEvo that assists users to generate and test empirical hypotheses for multi-generational research. TreeEvo summarizes and organizes family trees by structural features in a dynamic manner based on a traditional Sankey diagram. A pixel-based technique is further proposed to compactly encode trees with complex structures in each Sankey Node. Detailed information of trees is accessible through a space-efficient visualization with semantic zooming. Moreover, TreeEvo embeds Multinomial Logit Model (MLM) to examine statistical associations between tree structure and ancestral traits. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of TreeEvo through an in-depth case-study with domain experts using a real-world dataset (containing 54,128 family trees of 126,196 individuals).

Hao Dong. 2016. Patriarchy, Family System and Kin Effects on Individual Demographic Behavior Throughout the Life Course: East Asia, 1678-1945PhD Dissertation

Family matters universally, but the how and why differ by patriarchy and familysystems. This thesis not only aims for a better comparative understanding of co-resident kin effects on individual demographic disparities throughout the life course – child survival, lifetime reproductive success, and old-age mortality – across East Asian populations in the past, but also examines how macro family systems condition such micro family influence. I make use of five recently available datasets, consisting of some 4 million panel observations of more than 650,000 individuals who lived between 1678 and 1945 in northeast China, northeast Japan, southeast Korea, and north Taiwan. Most previous comparative population studies compare patterns of associations of family context and individual behavior between separate analyses on each population. This thesis, instead, standardizes, harmonizes, and pools data from all study populations, and employs a multilevel modeling approach to directly examine the effects of the presence/absence of kin and other family structural characteristics at the micro level and to model their interactions with family system measures at the macro level across populations and periods. This thesis provides detailed evidence that, on top of the salient patriarchal influence shared among these East Asian historical populations, macro family system and micro family context interact to shape individual demographic behavior throughout the life course.

Abstract: Human child survival depends on adult investment, typically from parents. However, in spite of recent research advances on kin influence and birth order effects on human infant and child mortality, studies that directly examine the interaction of kin context and birth order on sibling differences in child mortality are still rare. Our study supplements this literature with new findings from large-scale individual-level panel data for three East Asian historical populations from northeast China (1789–1909), northeast Japan (1716–1870), and north Taiwan (1906–1945), where preference for sons and first-borns are common. We examine and compare male child mortality risks by presence/absence of co-resident parents, grandparents, and other kin, as well as their interaction effects with birth order. We apply discrete-time event-history analysis on over 172,000 observations of 69,125 boys aged 1–9 years old. We find that in all three populations, while the presence of parents is important for child survival, it is more beneficial to first/early-borns than to later-borns. Effects of other co-resident kin are however null or inconsistent between populations. Our findings underscore the importance of birth order in understanding how differential human parental investment may produce child survival differentials between siblings.

Abstract: Comparison and comparability lie at the heart of any comparative social science. But, precise comparison is virtually impossible without similar methods and similar data. In recent decades, social demographers, historians, and economic historians have compiled and made available a large number of micro-level datasets of historical populations for North America and Europe. Studies using these data have already made important contributions to many academic disciplines. In a similar spirit, we introduce five new micro-level historical panel datasets from East Asia, including the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset – Liaoning (CMGPD-LN) 1749-1909, the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset – Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC) 1866-1913, the Japanese Ninbetsu-Aratame-Cho Population Register Database – Shimomoriya and Niita (NAC-SN) 1716-1820, the Korea Multi-Generational Panel Dataset – Tansung (KMGPD-TS) 1678-1888, and the Colonial Taiwan Household Registration Database (CTHRD) 1906-1945. These datasets in total contain over 3.7 million linked observations of 610000 individuals and are the first such Asian data to be made available online or by application. We discuss the key features and historical institutions that originally collected these data; the subsequent processes by which the data were reconstructed into individual-level panels; their particular data limitations and strengths; and their potential for comparative social scientific research.

Abstract: Unlike previous migration studies which mainly focus on individual migration, this article examines the long-term mortality consequences of childhood migration and resettlement. Using a unique Chinese historical population database, we trace 30,517 males from childhood onwards between 1792 and 1909, 542 of whom experienced childhood migration. We apply discrete-time event-history analysis and include a fixed effect of common grandfather to account for unobservable characteristics of the extended family. We also explore the influence of social networks on early-life migration experience by including kin network at destination. Our findings suggest that migration in childhood has substantial long-term effects on survivorship in later ages. From age 16 to 45, kin network at destination mediates the negative effects of childhood migration and lowers mortality risks. Moreover, child migrants who survive to older ages subsequently experience lower mortality. Such findings contribute to a better understanding of the implications of social behavior and social context for human health.